Monsters in the Woods

By Seamus McGraw

Oct. 12, 2014

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CreditCreditAndrea Dezso

BUSHKILL, Pa. — IT was a full two hours before dawn on a morning in late summer when my wife, a woman neither given to flights of fantasy nor easily spooked, brusquely elbowed me out of a deep slumber. As I shook off the sleep, I could tell by the look in her eyes that something had rattled her. That look rattled me.

That’s when I heard it, too, rolling up through the dense woods from the creek a couple of hundred yards below our home, a guttural, primal, urgent sound like nothing I’d ever heard before, at least not in the forests of eastern Pennsylvania. It’s hard to describe the din. It was full throated and somewhere between a moan and a roar. It didn’t sound like the clipped bellow of a bear or the howl of a coyote or the shriek of a bobcat, all of them familiar sounds in these woods.

This was different. It was terrifying and at the same time fascinating and alluring. If the seven deadly sins had a sound, this could have passed for six of them — lust, greed, envy, gluttony, you name it — any one of them but sloth. There was nothing slothful about this animalistic howl. It went on for a full 20 minutes, my wife recording it on her smartphone, before it at last drifted off deeper into the woods and out of earshot.

“You know what I think that sounded like?” I said finally.

“What?”

“A mountain lion,” an animal that, despite repeated reports of sightings, has been missing from these forests for more than a century.

“Couldn’t be,” she said. “Could it?”

“Probably not. But maybe.”

I’m not the smartest man in the world, but I’m not a complete fool, and so I waited, anxiously, for the sun to come up before I headed down to the creek bed to see if I could find any trace of the creature. I did. On the creek bank, just beside a downed tree, I found the carcass of what appeared to have been a healthy adult doe. It was the cleanest kill I had ever seen in these woods. Fastidious. Almost surgical in its precision. Over the course of the next two days, whatever it was returned and picked the carcass clean until there was nothing left at all but the skeleton, still utterly intact.

Then the killer vanished.

For the next few weeks, I made it my mission to figure out what it was that had evoked such primal feelings in my wife and me that morning. I contacted everyone I knew who might have an idea. I played the recording my wife had made and showed them the crime-scene-style pictures I had taken of the creature’s unfortunate victim. I contacted animal biologists, experts on mountain lions, also known as cougars, and backwoods adventurers who had spent decades in the woods. All of them were baffled.

The beast had left nothing behind that I could find but its victim. And in the absence of any other physical evidence, my sources could only speculate. Perhaps it was some other creature — a bear in distress, a wild pig, though those aren’t supposed to be in these woods either.

That didn’t mean there wasn’t the possibility, however remote, that it was a mountain lion. It’s not that there haven’t been isolated cases of Western mountain lions venturing east. Just a few years ago, a cat that had been tagged by biologists in the Midwest turned up as road kill in Connecticut, proof that these animals can wander far afield, even if there’s little chance that they’ll find a mate and repopulate this region.

No, the experts and the others all told me, they could not rule out the idea that what I heard was a mountain lion. It dawned on me that they didn’t want to — that, instead, they fervently hoped the beast in the woods that morning had been one of those big cats.

A Recording of the Animal in the Woods

Is this the sound of a mountain lion? Audio recorded on a smartphone.

It’s been 140 years since the last Eastern cougar was taken in Pennsylvania, and though there have been literally thousands of reports since, not once has anyone been able to produce a shred of evidence, a verifiable track, a piece of scat, a clump of hair, to prove that the cats have returned.

And yet, the apex predator that once stalked these woods remains very fresh in our imaginations. And perhaps that’s because of what they represent. It’s not just their remembered majesty, the stealth with which they once moved through the forest, their ability to kill swiftly and without warning, that touches something deep in our own animal core. It’s not just that we were once their prey.

Perhaps it’s because they became ours, that the regal predators became victims of what I believe is the eighth deadly sin, the one on which all the others are predicated — fear. Wasn’t it fear of the wilderness and its handmaiden, greed, that led us to hack away at the forests of Pennsylvania until there was no place left for the cat to hide? Wasn’t it fear that led us to harry and harass them until the last one was shot in rural Berks County in 1874? And isn’t it still just fear that leads us to want to believe, as the woods reclaim the land around here, that maybe, just maybe, the big cats are coming back? Because if that’s the case, if they really are stronger than all of the fearsome things we have done to them, then maybe we can be absolved of our original sin?

And if not? Then what other horrors have we inflicted on ourselves? What else has our fear set in motion? Could it be that we so desperately want to believe that there is something terrifying in the deep woods because the thought that there might not be is too terrifying to imagine?

I was still mulling that question a few weeks later as I made my way down Snow Hill Road, a poorly paved snake of a two-lane at the edge of thousands upon thousands of acres of dense wood. Ahead of me, behind me, on both sides of me, the leaves on the ash and the maple, the hickories and the oaks, had just begun to turn. A hint of the roar of color to come. But the canopy was still so lush that it all but blotted out the sun. At ground level, my woods were still a forest of shadows.

A mile or two farther on, and overhead I could hear the throbbing, percussive thrumming of a helicopter carving futile figure eights a couple of hundred feet above me as it tried to use its advanced infrared and heat-seeking equipment to peer into the forest.

Another mile and I started to see them, cruisers and Pennsylvania State Police S.U.V.s, and dark sedans with tinted windows and official-looking plates from neighboring states arrayed in formation along the side of the road, and standing next to them, a tense phalanx of young men with automatic weapons. They eyed me nervously as I drove past them slowly, and then turned their gaze quickly back to the tree line at the edge of the road.

They’d been there for days, and would be for weeks to come, an army of occupiers forming a perimeter around a small finger of the forest. They were searching, sort of, for an alleged cop-killing sniper named Eric Frein. He was a nobody, a nothing, a guy who liked to play dress up and pretend that he was a Serbian soldier and a survivalist. In reality, he was a 31-year-old man who still lived in his parents’ basement until, police say, he gunned down two state police officers during a shift change on Sept. 12, killing one, critically wounding the other and then disappearing into the forest.

Maybe he was still out there somewhere deep in those woods, hiding in the shadows. Maybe he hadn’t plummeted off some precipice into a rocky gorge in the forest, or turned his gun on himself, and maybe he was still alive. Or maybe he was long gone, and the only thing he had left behind were a few I.E.D.s, some discarded packages of ramen noodles, a handwritten note and a toxic cloud of fear settling like swamp gas in all the hidden corners of the woods.

As I looked at those grim, frightened young men with guns at the edge of the forest, I started to wonder if maybe I had been right all along. Maybe there is something in the woods that is truly terrifying and far beyond our ability to comprehend or control, an apex predator driven by the basest of instincts.

Maybe it’s the same monster that killed off the mountain lions.

Seamus McGraw is the author of the forthcoming book “Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories From the Front Lines of Climate Change.”